Hitting The Hiking Trail With A Cellphone And Pizza

It happens increasingly on the Appalachian Trail, the 2,189-mile footpath that extends from Georgia to Maine.

Long-distance hikers approaching a village use their smartphones to search the Internet for pizza parlors in the area. Once found, they order pizza delivered to the trail.

For example, on a recent day on the trail in Maryland near the West Virginia border a group of long-distance hikers sat with their backpacks at a point where the trail meets a road, took delivery of their pizzas, then hiked back several hundred yards to their campsite in the woods.

"While we do not like to promote this, people do order pizza," said Laurie Potteiger, information services manager with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy in Harpers Ferry, W. Va., the private nonprofit group that manages the trail. "There are issues with that. We manage the trail to provide a back-country experience."

Whether pizza-to-go belongs in an Appalachian Trail campsite is a question, but the reality is that over the past two decades digital technology has had an enormous impact on hiking, whether it involves people hiking the entire AT — they are known as thru-hikers — or hiking for a half-day or a day.

Outdoor enthusiasts Peter Marteka and Steve Grant have been sharing their hikes with Courant readers for years, and we've gathered some of their far-reaching Connecticut adventures for you here. You can read about some of Connecticut's most challenging hikes here.

(The Hartford Courant)

"It used to be just a small fraction of thru-hikers carried cellphones. They weren't very effective and they were not part of the culture," Potteiger said. "But now, it is an anomaly for someone not to carry one. Today, [on] most parts of the trail, you can get a signal some part of the day; some places you can get multiple signals per day."

Only in recent years has cell service in mountainous areas become much more available, along with the huge popularity of phones capable of Internet and email communication.

In a survey in 2013 and 2014, Dan Feldman of Bowdoinham, Maine, who maintains the blog distancehiking.com, determined that 95 percent of 466 hikers who hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and responded to his survey had at least one kind of cellphone, the great majority carrying a smartphone with a data plan. Only 6 percent of those hikers carrying a phone said they could have done without their cellphones.

The 2,189-mile-long Appalachian Trail follows virtually unbroken mountainous terrain from Georgia to Maine, passing through many states including New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts on the way. There is fine day-hiking with excellent views within easy driving distance of much of Connecticut.

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So, with smartphones comes the age of pizza or fast food in backcountry campsites. One concern, however, is pizza boxes or paper trash piling up in the designated campsites spaced throughout the famous trail, which faithfully follows the Appalachian Range, including slightly more than 50 miles of trail in northwest Connecticut.

Some long-distance hikers, 7 percent of those AT hikers who took Feldman's survey, now also carry tablets in their backpacks. Some hikers also carry solar charging equipment to keep their phones and tablets charged. Many long-distance hikers use their phones or tablets to post daily to their blogs.

With each passing year, technology impacts the hiking experience. In Connecticut, for example, the Connecticut Forest & Park Association, the major hiking organization in the state, has now embedded something called QR codes at 63 trailheads, which are points where hikers can park and enter a section of the trail.

A hiker walks up to a kiosk at the trailhead, and, having downloaded a compatible app, swipes the phone over a QR bar code posted in the kiosk. Instantly a map of the trail section ahead is downloaded to the phone.

"It is amazingly easy," said Eric Hammerling, executive director of the hiking and conservation group. The next step in that technology, he said, will also monitor constantly exactly where a person is on that section of trail, invaluable in getting help should a person be injured or become lost.

While cellphones are ubiquitous, and cell service improves each year, many hikers still forgo using phones on the trail. They may carry them, but they leave them turned off unless needed.

Whether in campsites, or hiking along the trail, "it is all about being considerate," Potteiger said. "Do not intrude on other people's experience." Many hikers, for example, frown upon other hikers talking on cellphones in group campsites, where often 15 or 20 hikers will spend the night.

One concern is that hikers might be too reliant on cellphones, which, of course, may not always have a signal in the woods, even today, and can be lost or broken.

"Technology is great, but there are some drawbacks to it if you don't have a backup plan and compass skills" if the phone doesn't work, said Dale Geslien, a former chair of the Connecticut chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club and a veteran hike leader.

On the other hand, with the vast amount of information now available on hike preparation and equipment that can be found online, it appears that long distance hikers on the Appalachian Trail are coming to the trail better prepared, said Brian B. King, publisher with the trail conservancy group. The percentage of hikers who set out to hike the entire trail and actually finished used to be 20 percent or less. It now approaches 30 percent, he said.

Moreover, technology also has changed hiking gear, with new fabrics and designs leading to ever-lighter backpacks, tents, stoves and other gear, all of which make it easier for a hiker to spend a day on the trail.

In 1995 The Courant organized a five-newspaper hike of the entire AT with the papers using the latest available technology to file stories and photos, and using the paper's website as a way for readers to interact with writers and photographers on the trail. That project serves as an example of how life on the trail has changed.

The Courant team did not carry cellphones because there was so little cell service along the trail, recalled Vic Kodis, the editor who oversaw the project for the Courant. Michael Kodas, the Courant photographer for the project, shot photos on film, which was picked up each week by a courier and processed back at the Courant, many miles away. The digital age of photography was still in its infancy.

In what was very modern journalism at the time, readers could ask questions of Courant hikers online or through a telephone call-in line, but any response had to wait until the hikers reached a landline and communicated with the paper, which was infrequent, Kodis said.

Today, a hiker with a cellphone has a signal virtually every day. Never mind film cameras, smartphones take increasingly good photos that can be distributed in seconds by email or social media. A hiker today can post a blog every day or almost every day, with readers able to comment or question posts immediately. Interaction with the outside world is essentially instantaneous.

Meanwhile, the AT, as one of the most famous trails in the U.S., is heavily used. The trails conservancy suggests that hikers attempting the whole trail begin at different points, rather than virtually all beginning in early spring in Georgia and hiking north.

Use of the trail is almost certain to increase dramatically when the film "A Walk in the Woods," based on the hugely popular book by Bill Bryson, is released in September. There was an increase in hikers after the newspaper series and after Bryson's book was published in 1998.